It appears that eBay is feeling the heat from competitors Amazon.com. Amazon has racked up a huge number of buyers and sellers thanks in part to the company's successful Prime service. EBay is still the most popular online auction site out there, but over the years has raised a significant amount of ire from sellers over their high fees and practices at both its auction site and its PayPal payment portal.

As a result, eBay has announced that it's lowering its fees for sellers by simplifying its final value fees with a percentage fee levied on each item sold that varies depending on product category. As it stands now these final value fees are a percentage of the items selling price. The online auction giant has also announced that some of its listing fees will also be eliminated with most changes taking effect on April 16.

"For most of our sellers the complexity of our fees were keeping them from being on eBay and preventing them from having full transparency into their profitability from selling on eBay," said Michael Jones, vice president of merchant development.

Sellers who list fewer than 12,250 items during any given month will see lower fees according to ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo.

Under eBay's new plans, sellers will get 50 free item listings per month and if the item sells, eBay will take 10% of the sale price, which still seems rather high. High-volume sellers will see new final value fees that range from 4% to 9% depending on the product category.

Sellers would get their feedback postings removed when the buyers complained about them. And besides, many sellers just waited to see that the buyer was happy before posting feedback so that everybody had a chance to make things right if something happened during the process.

There is no way "around" the rating system...now or ever, for sellers. A seller can't wait 30 days to ship an item to wait for the feedback window to close...if that's happening to you and you don't do anything about it as the buyer, then you're an idiot and you deserve what you get.

I have seen ridiculously few cases of actual seller fraud, and seemingly infinite amounts of buyer fraud - and the irrefutable fact of the matter is that the current system at eBay/PayPal endorses and enables buyer fraud without even the possibility of repercussions for the fraudulent buyer.